Savage, Richard

(1697-1743)

   Savage's claim to be the illegitimate son of Anne, Countess of Macclesfield, and Richard Savage, the 4th Earl of Rivers, was thought to be no more an over-imaginative mind. He claimed that his mother disowned him and had him apprenticed to a shoemaker, that he might be brought up in obscurity and forgotten. Samuel Johnson, in Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1744), says that Savage spent long, dark hours watching his mother's house 'in hopes of seeing her as she might come by accident to the window, or cross her apartment with a candle in her hand.' Savage published Miscellaneous Poems and Translations by Several Hands in 1726. In 1727 he was convicted for the murder of a man in a tavern brawl and only saved from the gallows by the intervention of Frances Thynne, countess of Hertford, who obtained his pardon the following year. He died poverty-stricken in a Bristol prison. Some of his poems: "Epistle to Damon and Delia," "On False Historians," "The Authors of the Town," "The Bastard," "The Genius of Liberty," "The Progress of a Divine," "The Wanderer," "Valentine's Day."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets, 1779-1781 (http://www2.hn.psu.edu/Faculty/KKemmerer/poets/preface.htm). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse. Roger Lonsdale, ed. Oxford University Press, 1984. The Oxford Book of Satirical Verse. Geoffrey Grigson, ed. Oxford University Press, 1980. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Poetical Works of Richard Savage. John Bell, 1791.